The new Dashboard Confessional Cd, The Shade Of Poison Trees, is another collection of heartfelt ballads, emotional retelling of broken hearts and the intensity of burning feelings.

The new Dashboard Confessional Cd is really nothing new, but… oh yes, there is a but.

The new Dashboard Confessional is good. Is actually excellent.

There is an intensity of fragile pain behind the watercolours that Chris Carabba uses to paint is breathy, eerie melodies, that gives these songs the strength that, at first, appears non existence, lost among the adolescent musing of his heart.

The formulaic nature of his work, something that many people uses to dismiss him as just an emo troubadour; it’s what makes him as loved and loathed at the same time. But, even under the well rehearsed delicacy of his sentiment, there is the vehement desire to be heard, to tell a story, to transform the banal into magical.

Chris Carabba, in his thirties, has retained the same, child like desire, to see the world through lenses that are, if not rosy, still multicoloured, translucent against the grey of an everyday life that suffocates feeling, and denies love the magical nature of its existence.

The music, tiptoeing around the suffused beauty of his lyrics, sometime feels almost redundant, a well played, mostly bland repetition of piano and clichéd guitars parts, but, just like the strength of the message, is really subtle. It creeps on you almost unnoticed, until it gets stuck in your head, and, just like your first crush, you don’t see the bad acne and the social awkwardness, you just feel the intensity of your heartbeat and the way it makes you feel.

Fall in love.

All over again.

by Laila